Building Societies' waste attacked

Britain's building societies are male-dominated and wasteful, Mrs Nona Byrne, the chairman of the Catholic Building Society said last week.
Speaking to the annual conference of the London area of the Building Societies Association in Eastbourne, she called for women directors to be appointed to every building society board and criticised the lavish sponsorship of sporting events.
Mrs Byrne also criticised the Government's plan to sell off 250,000 council houses, saying that the potential social problems had been underestimated. There was no assurance of continued and adequate public investment in new housing and she could not , see how societies could possibly meet such a huge demand for home loans with the present shortage of funds and long waiting lists.
Mrs Byrne is the only woman to be chairman of a British building society and it was the first time in 25 years that a woman has been one of the main speakers at the conference, She justified her demand for women directors by referring to their instinctive knowledge of financial planning and homemaking. Although about ten million women comprised 50 per cent of societies' membership, a "mere handful" of the 2,000 directors were women, she said.
Attacking the sponsorship of sporting events, she said that money would be better spent on advising young people about savings, housing and home ownership than on promoting the societies' public relations image.